The contest whose purpose was to encourage university students towards studies in R&D was organized by Airties, the leading firm in the sector of wireless data, sound and image technology. The participants are required to develop software for Embedded C Programs in Linux. The competition is open to all university and masters degree students around Turkey, who are willing to submit their projects for the assessment of the jury members. AirTies will determine the jury members from a list of experts and engineers. Various awards will be presented to the owners of the first three projects.
Airties has achieved for having qualified Turkish engineers and experts return back to their homeland and therefore it now employs a team of 45 people in its R&D department of which 16 engineers were previously working in Silicon Valley. Having reached a great success after applying for 10 patent applications in a short period of 3 years, the R&D Group Manager and Technological Visionary Metin Taşkın of AirTies said that their objective with this competition was to encourage universities towards research and development.
While pointing to the fact that 25 percent of the total number of AirTies employees work in the R&D department, Taşkın also explained the reason as to why the subject of the competition was determined as �Embedded C Program in Linux�:
�While the open source operating system Linux is becoming widespread on desktops and servers, it gained popularity because it is an open code standard open to everybody. It is also easily adaptable to support special hardware in devices, it is simple to transfer from one device to another and provides ease in the development of new applications because it is an embedded operating system. Therefore while C is the basic programming language in Linux, it is also valued as the most popular development platform in embedded devices. Both the worldwide increase in the use of devices that operate embedded software and the rise in the Linux operating system as an embedded software development platform have directed AirTies, which is currently using this platform in their products, to encourage its use in schools�.
Participation in the competition whereby all university students in Turkey can apply until the 11th of June 2007, can include the application of groups up to three people.
For detailed information about the competition and appliying you can visit: www.projekent.org/projeyarismasi

The hardware that will be provided to the participants of the contest:
1. AirTies Wireless Access Point
-Processor: Atheros AR2317 SoC (MIPS4K processor, MAC/BB and RF integrated SoC)
-Wireless network chip specifications: IEEE802.11b/g, CCK-OFDM modulation, hardware supported WEP/TKIP/AES encryption, AP-Station-Ad Hoc operation modes
-1 port Ethernet
-Fixed Memory: 2MB Flash ROM
-Memory: 16MB SDRAM
-A pair of software controlled LED�s
2. Electricity Adapter
3. Serial Console Cable

The software that will be provided to the participants:
1. Linux Kernel source code
2. Source code of the open source code Linux application packages
3. Source code of the MadWiFi Atheros wireless network adapter Linux driver
MadWifi characteristics: Multiple SSID, WDS